I like the new Google phone, which was made available by T-Mobile last week. Long-term, it’s going to be a mighty competitor to the Apple iPhone. The presence of smartphones in general, whether they are from Google, Apple, RIM, or anybody else, has made mobile email part of the enterprise. It has become commonplace for executives, sales reps, and other corporate road warriors to check and send company email while at lunch, on the road, or at a kid’s ballet recital–and there’s no doubt that this has been a tremendous boon for productivity. But what about email security and archiving? The folks in the back office handling email security and trying to stay compliant with archiving policies and regulations aren’t so happy about it.

Without a formal procedure in place, the path of least resistance is for road warriors to simply use their smartphones with free public email accounts, such as Hotmail or Gmail, but this is a corporate no-no (as we learned in the case of Ms. Palin) since it completely bypasses all corporate (or government agency, as the case may be) policies and precautions.

But the genie is out of the bottle, and nobody wants to give up the ability to check and send email while standing in line at Starbuck’s waiting for a cappuccino. Fortunately, they won’t have to. As far as the iPhone goes, I think it’s overpriced and has far too many consumer-oriented gee-gaws on it to be useful in a corporate setting, but it does have an advantage over the Google phone at present for corporate use. The iPhone has a good interface with Microsoft Exchange, which makes it much more usable for corporate email than the Google phone. This of course, allows the security guys in the back room to breathe a little easier, impose the usual security precautions and spam/virus protection, and properly archive emails even if they originate from a mobile device.

In the coming months however, the Google phone may well become more useful in the corporate setting, simply because of its open scheme. Unlike Apple, it is a lot easier for third-party developers to create and market applications for the device–and it will be a simple matter to create an application that can link with corporate email. It’s only a matter of time before these applications start to surface, and the Google phone becomes more useful for corporate email.